Disney's Snow White

It’s interesting to think about when Disney might put an end to this ‘live action’ remake thing.

With no consistent tone, logic or order you wonder if it’ll just suddenly stop or if they’ll put everything into production in the vague hope of achieving a true hit and potential franchise. Maybe the Treasure Planets or the Atlantis’ of the world could be the ones to work best.

Until then, we must ponder the latest attempt to craft something truly worthwhile from this endeavour: Disney’s Snow White (not sure why they’ve gone with the possessive title) and, suffice to say, it’s another lacklustre effort.

In fairness, crafting modern versions of the princess stories and casting them in live action ostensibly makes sense for Disney.

A chance to update the slightly old-fashioned narratives of their animated counterparts and fit them to modern sensibilities whilst making lots of money in doing so.

Sadly, none of them have quite worked as no one has quite nailed that tone of ‘make it modern but keep it classic.’

As such, we’re left with another pantomime production, treading the same story beats you know and love whilst stretching them to interminable length by adding in superfluous extra songs and trying to modernise certain aspects.

As always, you can see clearly the bits that work and the bits that don’t. The joins, the meddling, the re-edits and the compromises are all on show.

The ‘modernisation’ of the story is broadly ok. Gal Gadot’s updated Evil Queen is a theatrical delight and she hams it up and chews the walls off. Her couple of musical interludes are the clear highlight.

Likewise, the more driven and rounded Snow White feels more of the hero in her own movie than before and Rachel Zegler tows the line as best she can between appealing to the adults as well as the children in the audience.

Her Prince Charming is recast to an exiled rogue type protesting the Queen’s rule and her seven found companions excluded from the new title are a rather surreal and distracting CGI attempt to mimic their animated counterparts.

It’s all just very ‘meh’. Mostly fine but constantly sinking under its attempts to be everything to everyone. Large signs of ‘we’re trying to do everything right with this’ flash up everywhere.

Shamefully and most egregiously, it’s mostly just plain dull.

Not only is the wardrobe straight from a village pantomime but the sets and scenery look taken from a low-budget BBC production and the actual craft of the thing is non-existent.

With the budget and the source material to draw from it is absolutely heinous that this is as hideous as it is.

Likewise, the new songs and rejigged old ones bring everything screeching to a halt every time a character starts to sing. Unmemorable, unmoving and uninteresting visually.

Disney keep getting this wrong. There’s no originality here, no true attempt to take the story in new directions and, all the while, not actually a very good remake of its pioneering, visionary and classic original.

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